Department of History, Simon Fraser University
The Komagata Maru incident belongs to a racist and narrow-minded past that Canadians have not left far behind. In the Spring of 1914, a committee of Sikhs led by Baba Gurdit Singh, a wealthy Sikh from Singapore, chartered the steamer, the Kamagata Maru, to carry Indian emigrants to Canada. They had a sense of mission, and they called the steamer Guru Nanak Jahaz after the first Sikh Guru.
The Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver on May 23, 1914 with 376 passengers on board. With the exception of 20 returning residents and the ship’s doctor and his family, none of the passengers was allowed to land. Instead, they were detained in Vancouver Harbour. They remained on the ship for two months until July 23, 1914. When the passengers would not leave Canadian waters without provisions, Canadian officials tried to seize the ship by force. When that attempt failed, the Canadian government brought a navy cruiser with its guns exposed into Burrard Inlet and anchored it broadside to the Komagata Maru. In this atmosphere, Baba Gurdit Singh and his fellow passengers negotiated their departure. Only when the Canadian government agreed to provision their return voyage did they consent to leave without ever putting a foot ashore in Canada.
Vancouver’s newspaper carried the story of this ship and its passengers on their front pages throughout the summer.
Crowds lined the waterfront when the Komagata Maru arrived and they returned to gaze at the ship and its passengers whenever the promise of drama or action heightened. However, this curiosity and sense of excitement, did not awaken much sympathy among Vancouverites for the ordeal of the passengers or their desire to come to Canada.
For the most of this century, Canada has possessed an exclusionist immigration policy based on race and nationality. The policy had its origins in the 1880’s when the Canadian government first imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants. Over the next forty years, the government erected a variety of barriers to keep Canada a white man’s country, and by the 1920’s it had articulated a policy that remained intact until after the Second World War. From the 1920’s until the 1950’s, Canada gave preference to immigrants from Britain, France, Ireland, the white Dominions of the British Commonwealth, and the United States, to the exclusion of all other except those from Continental Europe (or the wives and children of Canadian residents).
Only in 1962 did Canada announce a new policy free of racial, religious or national discrimination. Since then, the composition of our population, especially in major cities, has changed remarkably, and Canadians have been learning to appreciate the very different society created as a result. As a consequence, we are beginning to reassess our past. Giving attention to the story of the Komagata Maru is part of that process.
The passengers on the Komagata Maru thought that they had the right to enter Canada because they were British subjects. If citizenship in the British Empire meant anything, they should have been able to go anywhere in the empire freely. Sikh soldiers had served throughout the Empire and the Sikh emigrants, many of whom were veterans of the Indian army, thought that they should be able to work wherever the British flag was flying. At the same time, some of them knew that the Canadian government did not concede that right.
The principal device used to exclude would be immigrants from India was the Continuous Journey Provision of the Immigration Acts of 1908 and 1910. Immigration officers, had the authority to refuse entry to anyone who did not come by continuous journey from his or her country of origin. Under pressure from the Canadian government, shipping companies would not sell through tickets from India to Canada, so it was impossible for anyone to come from India and meet the requirements of the Canadian law.
Ninety percent of the passengers of the Komagata Maru were Sikhs. The rest were Hindus and Muslims, but they all came from Punjab, the homeland of the Sikhs. Except for two women and four children, the passengers were men, most being between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The main attraction for them to leave their homeland was to find work in Canada at wages that were ten to fifteen times as high as anything that they could earn at home.
Some of the passengers came from Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and Mabila – ports in which they had been waiting for many months for an opportunity to reach North America. Others came directly from their village in Punjab. As soon as they heard that Baba Gurdit Singh was organizing a voyage t Canada, these villagers traveled by rail to Calcutta and took regularly scheduled passages to catch the Komagata maru at Hong Kong, Shanghai, Moji or Yokohama – ports where the Komagata Maru stopped before crossing the Pacific.
None of the passengers met the continuous passage requirement because the voyage of the Komagata Maru began in Hong Kong. Baba Gurdit Singh had tried to get a ship out of Calcutta, but agents of the Indian government had prevented it. Baba Gurdit Singh and the organizing committee understood the legal situation, but they believed that they had a strong case and were confided they could succeed if they challenged the Canadian law in court. Most of the other passengers simply believed that they had a right to land in Canada.
The ship left Hong Kong on April 4 and, after stopping at Shanghai, Moji and Yokahama, reached Williams Head, near Victoria, on May 22. The next morning, when the Komagata Maru dropped anchor in Burrad Inlet, the passengers dressed and prepared to go ashore, but that was not their fate. The immigration officials learned that the voyage was under-funded and immediately began to delay proceedings in the expectation that the ship could be forced to leave before anyone made a decision about the passengers’ right to land. An installment of $15,000 was due on the charter and the passengers did not have enough food or money on board to sustain a long waiting game.
While the officials played out this strategy, the passengers went without food and water on several occasions, often for more than twenty-four hours. At the same time, the immigration officials held the passengers incommunicado, refusing to allow anyone to come on board to talk to them, not even the lawyer hired on their behalf. Still, the ship remained in harbour, because Vancouver’s Punjabi community raised money to pay for the charter and to send food out to the ship.
Between five and six thousand Punjabis had entered Canada before 1908. Many had crossed the border to find work in Washington, Oregon and California, and others had returned to India after working for several years in Canada. But in 1914, more than two thousand remained in British Columbia. At least half of them were living in Vancouver where they had built a Sikh Gurdwara under the management of the Khalsa Diwan Society.
The executive of the Khalsa Diwan Society took the lead in organizing a Shore Committee to raise money on behalf of the passengers. Within days of the arrival of the Komagata Maru, the Shore Committee raised $5,000 in cash among the Sikhs of Vancouver. Subsequently, they raised another $20,000 to pay the Japanese ship owners and keep the ship in the harbour.
Finally, after the passengers had been confined on board for a month, the Shore Committee and the immigration department agreed to terms that allowed a test case to go before the courts. Five judges of the British Columbia Court of Appeal heard the arguments at the end of June and, in the first week of July, the court rendered its verdict against the passengers.
At this point, the men on the ship said they were willing to give up the battle and go. However, another three weeks elapsed before they actually departed. The government insisted that the charterers and owners of the ship were responsible for provisions. While these groups argued about the costs, the passengers would not leave without supplies for the return trip.
Officials interpreted this refusal as a delaying tactic and attempted to gain control of the ship with a police boarding party on the Sea Lion, but the passengers drove them off with a barrage of coal and fire bricks. The government then brought in the cruiser HMCS Rainbow and aimed its guns at the Komagata Maru. Nevertheless, it was only when officials promised to put provisions on board that the passengers agreed to weigh anchor.
In the early morning of July 23, the Komagata Maru sailed out of Vancouver Harbour with 352 passengers still on board. A large number of spectators stood along the shore above the C. P.R. tracks looking down over Coal Harbour to see the Komagata Maru begin to lift her anchor at 5:10 a.m. – a few minutes before sunrise. There was a cold nip in the air as they watched the Komagata Maru slide away, with the HMCS Rainbow as her shadow, until the two vessels disappeared around Brockton Point. For the passengers and for their friends on shore it was a bitter and deeply disappointing moment.
A voyage that begun on April 4, did not end until September 29 when the Komagata Maru docked at Budge, twenty miles downstream from Calcutta. The passengers had been refused permission to land by the governments of Hong Kong and Singapore and were forced to go all the way back to India, although many might have chosen to look for work elsewhere. By this time the passengers were fully aware of the political implications of their voyage and they expected to stir up the feelings of their countrymen with this demonstration of the injustice and inequality that existed in the Empire.
Unfortunately, the British government of India saw the men on the Komagata Maru as dangerous political agitators. When the ship docked at Budge, the police tried to arrest Baba Gurdit Singh and the twenty or so other men that they saw as leaders. In the process, shots were fired and nineteen of the passengers were killed. Some escaped, but the remainder were arrested and imprisoned or sent to their villages and kept under village arrest for the duration of the First World War. Six months of confinement on board the Komagata Maru ended for most of these passengers in another form of confinement.
In India, the Komagata Maru represents the Indian people’s struggle for independence from the British Empire. In Canada, it is a reminder of a policy of exclusion that for Sikhs and other immigrants from India, lasted more than half a century. The Sikh community has survived and prospered in Canada, despite the prejudice and hostility that the Komagata Maru story typifies. The community has emerged in the 1980’s with a positive and confident outlook. In a more tolerant Canada, the Komagata Maru remains a powerful symbol for Sikhs, one that other Canadians should understand because it is a part of our history.
Source:
Johnston, H., “The Komagata Maru Incident”. Beyond the Komagata Maru Race Relations Today Conference Proceedings, edited by Alan Dutton. The Progressive Indo-Canadian Community Services Society, 1989 pp 3-8.
With Permission